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UCLA Report: Schools In Nation’s Capital Are Still Very Segregated

There is a certain American ideology, which would love for every citizen to believe that the nation’s public school systems have changed for the better in the decades since Brown v. The Board of Education(1954).

However, around 63 years after that landmark piece of federal legislation paved the way for the integration of America’s schools, many school districts are still rampantly segregated. According to a new report published by The Civil Rights Project at UCLA, school segregation is going on right under the noses of lawmakers in Washington D.C.

In fact, the racial disparities going on in the K-12 education world of the nation’s capital are some of the worst in the country. A February 9th press release, which was also published by The Civil Rights Project at UCLA partially reads as follows:

“The UCLA Civil Rights Project today released a new research report on segregation and its alternatives in Washington D.C. showing that despite the sharply increasing diversity of the nation’s capital, generation after generation of African American students in Washington D.C. have attended intensely segregated schools and still do in a city with a wider racial achievement gap than any state.” (CivilRightsProject.UCLA.edu)

The full UCLA report is titled Our Segregated Capital: An Increasingly Diverse City with Racially Polarized Schools. A portion this reads as follows:

“In comparing public and charter schools of the District of Columbia, double segregation – segregation by race and poverty — was higher in the charter schools where nearly three- fourths of the students were low income, and black and Latino students had far more poor classmates than did their Asian and white counterparts. In public schools more than half of students were poor, and black and Latino students tended to attend schools with a far higher percentage of low-income classmates than white students. The percent of black students in a school was highly correlated with the proportion of students living in poverty. There was no significant relationship between the Latino share and the proportion of low-income students, a very different pattern than is found in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and many cities with larger shares of Latino students.” (CivilRightsProject.UCLA.edu)

Facts listed in the entire report on school segregation in Washington D.C. can be read by clicking the link to the second source listed below.